A New Form of Advertising?

            Being interested in advertising, I began to think about the different ways research can contribute to how and advertising campaign will go, if it will be successful or not. I recently read an article about a new type of advertising, something I have never heard of, but seems to growing at a steady pace: SMS advertising. This is a fairly new idea, “mobile advertising”, and there is not much information about how effective it is, and what is contributing to its success.

            This research was done to investigate the significance of a number of factors associated with SMS advertising through an experimental study. They found that incentive, interactivity, appeal, product involvement, and attitude towards SMS advertising directly influences the attitude toward the advertisement, attitude toward the brand and purchase intention. In order to improve the effectiveness of SMS advertising, they need to have a stronger focus on these factors.

            The procedure that was performed was that they split up groups of people and showed them advertisements on their phones. One hundred percent of the people owned cell phones and sixty-nine percent used SMS 1+ daily. They showed both groups different ads with different attributes, such as interactivity, to see which ones stuck in their heads. The researches then collected their data based on all of these different characteristics to formulate their conclusion.

            I feel like this is where advertising is heading; we have already concurred the Internet, why not move to everyone’s cell phones? This study proved that just about everyone has a cell phone, they had 100% of the participants have one, so why not go one step further and start advertising over text messages? This study was done out of the University of Athens in 2007, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t be coming to the United States in a very short time.

            We see advertisements everywhere, whether we’re on the highway or on our favorite website, we can’t escape them, so why not begin send them to us in SMS text messages? This could be the next way to reach consumers, in a cheaper and less time-consuming way. However this also could be the next thing burdening the average American consumer, yet another advertisement clouding our minds on a daily basis.